Archive for November, 2013

The former Boxer puts on the Gloves

The End of American Democracy?

Weare on theverge of a paradigm shift in the way the Senate of the United States operates as Senator Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada who serves as Majority Leader, has announced his intention to dramatically change the rules governing how business is conducted in that august body. Although he is a former boxer, like most prize fighters I have known he is a mild mannered outside the ring. Hence he was forced to take the action he announced today. Now Republican Senators in the Grand Obstructionist Party will no longer be allowed to filibuster Presidents Obama’s appointments to critical government posts and the lower courts of the federal judiciary.

The numbers tell the story of why this action had to be taken. As Senator Reid said in explaining his decision: In over 200 years of US Senate deliberations the Senate has employed the filibuster to block presidential appointments 168 times, but half of them occurred during the five years of the Obama administration!

The Majority Leader underscored his point by citing the great disparity in the numbers of appointments confirmed by the Senate of President Obama’s predecessors – Bill Clinton and George Bush – within the same time frame. He reminded the American electorate by the 4th of July in his second term the senate had confirmed 80 of President Clinton’s nominees. And by the 4th of July in his Second term President Bush had 118 of his appointments confirmed. But by the 4th of July this year, only 34 of President Obama’s nominees have been confirmed. These numbers supply irrefutable evidence for Senator Jeff Merkle’s contention that the Republican’s in both Houses of Congress have been exceeding their constitutional authority by “waging war on the presidency!”

However changing the senate rules to suppress the promiscuous abuse of the filibuster to thwart president Obama’s efforts to govern the country according to the vision he campaigned on, and was elected to enact, is a double edged sword. This point seems to escape the majority of those who have been calling upon Senator Reid to take this step – which is popularly known as “the nuclear option” – and now vigorously applaud his actions.

While it is unquestionably the best way to end the Republican efforts to nullify the results of the last two presidential elections by employing the filibuster to block President Obama from implementing his policies and appointees, when the Republicans regain control of the White House and the Senate, as they inevitably will alas, it could pave the way for them to finish their effort to transform the United States from a popular democracy where the people can regulate the power of capital through government policy, into a plutocracy where the filthy rich not only own the country’s wealth but also control government policy by electing their shills to office.

The Supreme Court – which is stacked with Republican appointees – has laid the groundwork for this in the Citizens United Decision, which nullified all laws limiting political spending by corporations and allowed them to make their contributions anonymously. At the same time the court has struck down a critical section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which required the states with a history of racist voter suppression to pre-clear any changes in the voting laws with the Justice Department. It is difficult to overstate the disastrous implications of this decision.

The Voting Rights Act was passed in the heat of a national struggle that embarrassed the US around the world and placed American diplomacy at a disadvantage in competing with the Communist Bloc, led by a nuclear armed Russia, for the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions of non-white peoples in the emergent nations newly liberated from European colonialism. With the collapse of the Communist Bloc racist right wing politicians need not worry about what the Russians think about domestic American politics, thus they are unconcerned with world opinion.

Ironically, the party that has made opposition to “judicial activism” a sacred cow now applauds one of the most blatant acts of judicial activism in history. It will literally change the character of American politics. The ultimate tragedy is that all of this is taking place right out in the open yet the majority are too addicted to the pleasures of wine, song, bread and circuses to notice. Thus in their ignorance they do just what Thomas Jefferson warned an ignorant electorate would do: “Elect and return the worse people to office!”

Thus it falls to the enlightened sections of the electorate to oppose them; which means that should the Republicans capture the White House and the Senate, and the Democrats control the House of Representatives, they will have no choice but to become obstructionists and behave like the Republicans are acting now. Minority leader Mitch McConnell’s threat to use this procedure to confirm Supreme Court nominees appointed by Republican presidents when they regain the majority – something the Democrats have stopped short of – insures that the House Democrats will have to act as a check on Right-wing Republicans.

Mad Mitch: Leader of the Disloyal Opposition

An Unreconstructed Red Neck who vowed to wreck the Obama Presidency

At the moment however, this action will be exploited by Republicans to confirm a narrative about President Obama that they invented out of whole cloth: That he aspires to be a dictator or king! Yet any objective observer who has been paying attention to American politics know that President Obama deeply reveres the Constitution –on which he is an authority – and entered the presidency as a champion of bi-partisanship. Indeed, he has been so willing to compromise that he has been accused of “selling out” by his supporters in the left -wing of the Democratic coalition.

But the Republican Party is in the hands of right-wing ideologues who view compromise, which is essential to governing in a divided government, as betrayal of their cause – which is to prevent President Obama from enacting his program. Already the verbal arsonists in right-wing media are hysterically ranting about the “Obama dictatorship.

Alas, the majority of Americans are clueless about the deeper meaning of the gridlock we are witnessing in Congress – the polls show that they blame both the Democrats and Republicans – but serious scholars of American governance know better. In his scholarly tome “It’s Worse Than It Looks,” Norman Orenstein, one of the most knowledgeable scholars of the Congress, places the blame for the increasing dysfunction of the US government right where it belongs: On congressional Republics!

The upshot of all this is that America is becoming ungovernable right before our eyes; the longest functioning democracy in history is becoming unworkable. And when future historians, far removed from the political passions of this moment, interrogate the government’s records from this period seeking the cause of this catastrophe, they will discover two things. The collapse of our democratic political process was self-inflicted, and it was the work of impassioned right-wing ideologues in the Republican Party who approached negotiations with the attitude of a suicide bomber!

They will point to the fact that American style popular democracy – which I believe has the potential to be the best system of governance in the world – is only possible with an informed electorate who choose representatives that are committed to serving the best interests of the majority of American citizens. And they will marvel at the extent to which working class white Americans were persuaded to cut their own throats by supporting politicians promoting policies that were opposed to the interests of their class and hastened their demise. It is the very definition of dangerous folly!

A Portrait of the Ravages of Meth

A Cautionary Tale about Dancing with the Monster

Ihappened to stumble upon a video report on the state of Meth- Amphetamine addiction in Fresno California – which can be accessed by doubling clicking on the link at the bottom of this essay – and it was shocking…to say the least. I am amazed that Meth is still a problem in the US. This is a very dangerous drug! I know whereof I speak; I tried it once almost fifty years ago. I was living in Philly at the time and we called Meth “Monster.” The way I came to try it was happenstance. And although it was my first and last time, it was one of the most memorable experiences of my life!

I had been awake over 24 hours reading William L. Shirer’s engrossing masterpiece “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” a massive tome based on official German documents captured and translated by western intelligence agencies after World War II. It is a book of several hundred pages (I forget the exact number) and I couldn’t put it down. So I had taken to drinking black coffee to stay awake, when a friend of mine – Jomo Jones – came by my crib about six in the evening. I began telling him about the book and noted how I was fighting off sleep to continue reading.

“So you wanna stay awake?’ he asked. Well I got something here that will keep you awake as long as you want to stay up.” He broke out a little plastic bag with some white crystal powder and said just snort some of this up your nose like you would a Vicks inhaler whenever you feel yourself getting sleepy.” Well, this was the beginning of a nightmare which landed me in the hospital three days later convinced I was having a massive heart attack.

I was so convinced of it that I ran out of my crib eight o clock at night in my drawers clutching my chest and screaming that I was dying from a heart attack! I ran up to a group of my neighbors passing by, clutched my chest, and announced that I was having a heart attack, then I dramatically fell to the ground as if I was dying! They of course quickly called the emergency wagon and I was soon off to the hospital in an ambulance with lights flashing and siren blaring!!

I was rushed into the emergency room of Hanneman Hospital on Broad Street laid out on a stretcher, and a team of doctors hurried to save my life. But the more they examined me they quieter they got. They hooked me up to a machine and measured my heart rate….looked at each other again, and began to mumble back and forth.

They just stared at me silently, until the appointed spokesman asked “Sir, what makes you think you are having a heart attack? There is nothing wrong with your heart.” When they told me I was alright, I sat right up as if nothing had happened and tried to play it off with some improvised BS. But the doctors’ weren’t buying my story and insisted upon knowing why I Thought I was having a heart attack.

In my still paranoid mind I thought they were trying to entrap me, that they had figured out I had ingested an illegal drug and had either called the police already or were planning to do so. Suddenly, visions of the gendarmes coming to put me in chains danced about in my head – especially since I was a radical activist and was half paranoid anyway – I started to jump up and flee, but I thought the better of it since I was dressed only in a hospital gown. Hence I decided to use my verbal skills to plead my case. I began to tell them that I was a honorable young man during serious work and they were about to ruin my life and career by turning me over to the cops!

They looked at me like the madman that I was and the spokesman calmly replied “We have already figured out that you have been experimenting with some kind of controlled substance,” but explained that in order to help me they needed to know what it was. The doctor when on to calmly explain “We are neither preachers nor policemen; we are physicians. We are not interested in the moral or legal aspects of your behavior, only the pharmacology.” When T told them I had ingested something called “Methodrine” they became alarmed.

They explained to me that this was a very dangerous drug, and when I tried to tell them how much I took by referring to the approximate size of the pile Jomo had poured, they told me that since it was made by crooks they had no way of really measuring how much I had ingested because not knowing it’s exact chemical composition “we don’t know what a dose is.”

These things had never occurred to me when I snorted the Monster. Now I was sitting in the emergence feeling like the world’s biggest fool. The doctors conferred with each other, and after a series of grunts and nods of the head they told me they were going to put me on sedatives for the next couple of days and ordered me to my bed.

Then came the most surprising moment of the evening. Although I had Blue Cross/Blue Shield – cause I had a job with benefits, an increasingly scarce opportunity for young people entering the work force today – I didn’t know my policy number and other important information, since I was healthy as a horse and had never had occasion to use it. So as I began to discuss he could arrange payment for my visit – since I had arrived in my skivvies with neither money nor identification papers on my person – the doctors offered to barter their services.

The spokesman said to me “There is a demand that has emerged from the Civil Rights Movement that is all over the news and has a lot of people confused. And you look like if anybody can explain what it means you can.” I guess he surmised that from my sizable Afro and beard, which was usually well groomed bit was looking real wild and crazy at the time. And with a deep breath, as all eyes fixated on me, he put the question forthrightly: “What does Black Power mean?”

With a sigh of relief, I sat straight up on my bed and held forth in a compelling lecture. They thanked me profusely, gave me a robe, and arranged for me to be driven home. That was the end of me and Meth. However I had other friends whose decision to dance with the Meth Monster ended tragically. One example will suffice.

I once had a dear friend who was highly educated, a lawyer and a musician and great at both, a husband and father of the first order. One night on a gig he was turned on to meth by a fellow musician who told him it would keep him awake and alert better than cocaine, the dangers of which my friend knew and thus stayed away from. He thought Monster was a safer choice, plus it was cheaper. Well, he got hooked. To make a short tragic story shorter, I’ll cut to the chase. One Christmas morning his wife called me in a fit of hysteria, she said my friend had “lost his mind.” First he was running around the house saying there were zombies and Vampires hiding in the closets and they were trying to pull him in.

He terrified the children and then he ran screaming from the house, jumped in the car and sped off, crashed into a steel pillar holding up the elevated train, totaled the car and killed himself…on Christmas morning. That was enough to scare me away from hard drugs and especially the hallucinogens forever. Hence I went through the sizzling sixties and never took an acid trip, never ate any mushrooms, never smoked Peyote or messed with Mescalito. Except for wisdom weed, rum and wine I was sober as a judge while all around me people were experimenting with them all!

Yet I thought there were enough tragic stories about the disastrous effects of abusing the Meth Monster to have have driven it off the market. Not so, I discovered in this gripping video report. Instead I learned that, as with cocaine, Meth addicts are now smoking it the way coke heads turned to “Free Basing” and then to Crack.

If you have any friends or loved ones who are abusing this dangerous drug, you should intervene immediately, if not sooner, and let them know that it is as addictive as crack and far more destructive to the body! Plus it can make them do some very crazy destructive things – to themselves and all those around them. For this reason the Monster must never be legalized…and abusers should be forced into treatment by order of the courts….and the suppliers should feel the full force of the laws: the more draconian the better!

A pretty, perky, Proper White “Lady” and her Five Bangers

Is the Interracial Gang Bang a White Feminist Statement?

In the now classic English novel Lady Chatterly’s Lover, written by D. H. Lawrence in 1928, whichprovoked quite a scandal at the time, there was a class of men called “Fuckers.” They were generally working class men of strapping physiques, well-endowed private parts and great stamina. They were the bulls selected by high class ladies to get their Jones fixed, sexual toy boys that filled the gaps left yawning by their effete, effeminate, or indifferent husbands. The novel’s view of sex and class in British society sparked a wave of outrage and was even subjected to an obscenity trial in England.

The fact that D. H. Lawrence’s once bawdy novel now barely raises an eyebrow among the reading public bespeaks the radical change in attitudes toward sex and class in Britain. Just as the seemingly endless and ubiquitous videos of white women engaging in sexual “gangbangs” with groups of generously endowed black males signals a paradigm shift in attitudes toward race, gender and sex in the United States.

For people born after the struggles of the 1960’s were over, and even for black men who always lived in the North, the full extent of white male rage over the very thought of white women having sex with black males is unbeknownst to them, and unimaginable to most Americans today. It was once the ultimate taboo in American society; in the Deep South it may well have been more abhorrent than incest. But those of us who are of the same generation as Emmett Till, and were living in the South during the 1950’s when this spunky black teenager from “up North” was beaten to death by a posse of enraged white men because he whistled at one of their wives, remember that white male rage all too well.

Emmitt Til

A signal moment in the life of black southern males

The Funeral of Emmit Till

This is what happen to black men that flirted with white women

We also remember how it was a badge of honor among southern white men to have sexual relations with black women, which they did with impunity even though they had passed the anti-miscegenation laws forbidding interracial sex. It was a southern tradition extending back to slavery times; a situation that caused many black men to fantasize about fucking a white girl just to settle a grudge against white men.

The unfairness of the rules regarding interracial sexuality was highlighted by the fact that racist white men openly consorted with their black women, who were willing partners in crime. They even came to visit their chocolate delights at their homes in the black community; some even had several children by them.

Some prominent white men had white families on one side of town, or in a nearby town and a black family in Dark Town. And there was nothing that black men could do about it because white male sexual access to black women was one of the sacred pillars of white supremacy. A striking case in point was Jimmy Brock, the manager of the Monson Motor Lodge, the guy who put the acid in the pool when Dr. Martin Luther King tried to swim in the motel pool; Brock sired multiple children by several black women!

Jimmy Brock Pouring Acid in Motel Pool

But he loved having sex with black women

The case of Strom Thurmond, longtime Senator and quintessential southern gentleman, is a representative anecdote of the story of white men and black women in the South during the era of segregation and open white supremacy. Thurmond, who served in the Senate for over half a century, was an exemplar of the so-called “southern way of life.”

Although while a young man of 22, he was tupping his family’s sixteen year old black maid, who gave birth to his first child, a daughter. Although this fact was well known in the black community in South Carolina – especially to her fellow black students and Administration of South Carolina State College, it was never acknowledged in the white community. Nor did it restrain him from becoming a firebreathing racist, denouncing “niggers” and cursing “race mixing,”

I was first told about Strom’s daughter by a friend of mine who went to college with her, and clearly remembers Senator Thurmond coming to the college and the administration – who depended on state funds to survive – setting aside a special room for them to meet. It is virtually impossible to imagine what his daughter must have been thinking when as a young woman she witnessed her father, who was the leader of the Southern “Nullification” movement that vociferously fought against civil and voting rights for black people; the people who had nurtured her even as her father’s people refused to recognize her existence.

However we can get some idea of what she might have felt from reading her testimony. In her book “Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurman,” which she published after 70 years of silence, Essie Mae Washington-Williams recalls what it was like when she visited her father in his law office in South Carolina to collect child support payments. “He never called my mother by her name. He didn’t verbally acknowledge that I was his child.”

Curiously, Essie Mae also tells us that even as she watched her father become the leader of the “Dixiecrats” in 1948, the southern branch of the Democratic Party that broke with the national party after liberal Minneapolis Mayor Hubert H. Humphrey succeed in getting a civil rights plank adopted in the Party Platform in the Presidential election that would sweep Harry Truman back into the Oval Office, she remained silent about his racial hypocrisy.

Strom Thurmond and his White Wife take a Ride on Fine Horses

Like Jefferson: A front porch puritan and backyard lecher!

She remained silent even after Thurman declared: “There’s not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches.” Essie Mae stood in the shadows and remained silent even as her father spoke on the Senate floor for 24 hours without a break to filibuster the 1957 Civil Rights Bill.

Essie Mae stood and watched as dear old dad opposed all of the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960’s that bestowed upon her full civil rights for the first time in her life, and dramatically increased the life chances of her children and grand-children in American society. All of these acts piled insult upon injury, but she never said a mumbling word.

Why did she do it? Why did she follow in the footsteps of her mother and say nothing as this man did his best to keep her people under the heal of white supremacy? In her memoir she offers a terse explanation, “He trusted me, and I respected him.” Say what? Essie Mae is a representative example of the kind of black southern women who was capable of loving a man that despised her mother, her mother’s people, and denied her existence.

This is a tradition that began during slavery, and is exemplified in the long running relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave concubine Sally Hemings, with whom he sired seven children, and never formally freed them or her from slavery. Indeed he denied them even as they lived under his roof. Yet the persistent rumors of a sexual relationship with “Dusky Sally” almost cost Jefferson the Presidency. Alas, sometimes think Condoleeza Rice is also just a sophisticated updated version of Sally, especially when I reflect upon her relationship with George Bush.

Senator Strom Thurmond and his Oldest Daughter Essie Mae

However as southern white women gained a broader education beyond that required to be a good home maker – which was referred to in the parlance of the age as “women’s work,” they began to think critically about southern society and their role in it. And in 1949 a group of these white southern women got together and issued a manifesto seeking to redefine that role in a critical – even revolutionary way.

Lillian Smith, a moving force in the white anti-racist women’s revolt, wrote a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady of the US for three terms, explaining her goal at the time: “I have been trying for six or seven years to prove to white southern women of my social class that we can speak out plainly about racial democracy, that we can take a public stand against discrimination and even against segregation without losing too much prestige and without suffering martyrdom. It seems very important to me for a southern woman to demonstrate this successfully”

To this end she not only ran a progressive private school for well-to-do white girls in Georgia and wrote “Strange Fruit” in 1944,a shocking novel about interracial love that was banned throughout the south, then wrote a seminal analysis of the pathologies in white southern culture, especially the sexual hypocrisy of the southern white patriarchy. Appropriately titled “Killers of the Dream,” I believe this text to be the best single volume on the nature and consequences of what people like Strom Thurmond affectionately called “The southern way of life.” The picture she paints is not pretty. To begin with, she calls proper white southern white Christian men, beginning with the Founding Fathers, “front porch puritans and back yard lechers!”

Lillian Smith

A brilliant writer and champion of black southern Men

Lillian Smith’s unique insights into the pathological nature of the celebrated “southern way of life” was aided by what Dr. W.E.B. Dubois called the “second sight” or ‘double consciousness” developed by outsiders who must make their way in a hostile culture. As a woman who rejected the concept of “southern womanhood,” which she saw as nothing more than an extension of white patriarchy over women; an open dissenter against the system of racism and segregation, which she viewed as another expression of the power of white male patriarchs; a feminist and a sexual rebel who had love affairs with women, Lillian was a radical dissenter in the south of the mid-twentieth century.

And she saw the question of sexual freedom as critical to personal freedom, which is why she supported the right to interracial love. It is interesting that many of the most progressive white women on the race question also recognized its relationship to the oppression of women because of their sex. And the more radical feminist recognized that male control of their choice of sexual partners was an expression of masculine privilege and power, the more they sought to subvert…some by becoming lesbians.

Some of these women rebels – like Eleanor Roosevelt and the progressive lesbian intellectuals with whom the First Lady carried on sexual liaisons in a cottage on their estate in the New York suburbs, while Franklin carried with his mistress – conceived some of FDR’s most progressive policies which were planted in the President’s head through Eleanor’s pillow talk. This is not a matter of speculation; it is well documented in the recently published book “One Nation Under Sex,” an excellent history of deviant sexual behavior in America’s political leaders from the founding of the American Republic. Written by Dr. David Eisenbach, a professor of American history, and published by radical free speech advocate and erstwhile pornographer Larry Flynt, this seminal text is a wild and crazy tale that significantly alters how we must view American history.

The Women’s Liberation Movement in America is a mass transformative movement whose objective was to elevate the status of women in American society through winning legal rights and expanding individual freedom. In this sense it is the same class of phenomenon as the Civil Rights Movement or the Algerian Revolution, hence despite their obvious ideological differences and specific tactics, it has many things in common.

A fundamental characteristic of all such movements is that despite their commitment to a mutually shared goal –i.e. women’s liberation – the individual organizations that make up the mass movement have widely varying ideas about what “liberation” means. This was true in the 19th century when the feminist movement was born. There were the respectable Christian ladies like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and irreverent radicals like the beautiful brilliant Victoria Woodhull, a business woman and newspaper publisher – who presented public lectures arguing that it was more honorable for American women to be whores than wives.

Victoria Woodhull

19 Century Feminist Firebrand

The ideological diversity of the 20th century Women’s Liberation Movement was even more complex, ranging from disgruntled housewives like Betty Friedan, who just wanted to win full equality for women in all areas of American life in order to improve relations between men and women, to the radical Feminists whose militant hostility to men were expressed in the Red Stockings Manifesto.

The ultimate declaration of war on the male species was expressed by the radical feminist philosopher Ti Grace Atkinson. For many of these women, sex with men was an act of betrayal. Born to privilege in a well to do white family in Louisiana, Atkinson first took a degree in fine arts at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1960’s and worked for a while as a critic and arts administrator.

Then she discovered the French Existentialist writer, and gal pal of the famed philosopher John Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir’s feminist book “The Second Sex.” Grace was so inspired by this treatise she entered Columbia University and earned a PhD in philosophy. She began a correspondence with Simone, who told her to seek out Betty Friedan, the founder of the National Organization of Women. Like the women in NOW, and quite unlike Grace, Simone loved men; although she may well have been bisexual. Rumor has it that she was bangin the handsome Afro-American novelist Richard Wright, who was the toast of Paris at the time. Richard Wright has said only “Simone really knows how to be a woman.”

Grace began her feminist activism as a member of NOW, but soon rejected their goals and methods as became the voice of the ultra- radical lunatic fringe of the Women’s Liberation Movement, calling the women in NOW stinking Jackals! She was in such a state of militant rage and desperation that she sought the advice of Joe Columbo, a mob leader in New York City, because she wanted to make her “sisterhood’ as strong as his brotherhood.”

She also penned an essay titled “The Institution of Sexual Intercourse,” in which she argued that the male erection is an act of hostility against women, and for there to be true equality between the sexes men would have learn to cum with flaccid penises. And, of course, according to Grace, women don’t truly enjoy vaginal intercourse with men anyway because all of their erotic sensation is in the “joy button.” That this dyke inspired penis envy is transparent poppy-cock – which I can attest to on my own authority based on the injection of hard evidence – is beside the point. What is important is that this unscientific drivel was being argued as gospel truth by some very smart women, which is a measure of the desperation felt by militant feminist lesbians.

There were puritanical feminist ideologues who adhered to conventional notions of sexual morality, and others felt that the entire notion of “acting like a lady” was to acquiesce in allowing their role in society to be defined by the perogatives of patriarchy. Some of these women rejected the role of “lady” and chose to be tramps, sluts, whores; the polar opposite of the male defined role of “lady.” Hence being a slut became a radical act of liberation. Thus the feminist porn stars, such as Mary Rexroth and Annie sprinkle were born, along with provocative sexual “performance artists” like Veronica Vera.

Dr. Annie Sprinkle: Feminist Porn Star

Goddess/Guru to feminist Sluts

These radical sexual activists use public sexual performances to destroy any vestige of the respectable lady as defined by male dictated norms. And the white ladies who are the stars of interracial Gangbang movies are their spiritual heirs, whether they know it or not. It does not matter if it is a conscious act of rebellion against gender and race-based sexual taboos, no more than it matters whether women in the military understand the fight and thought that made their existence possible; they are standing on the shoulders of the women who preceded them.

Veronica Vera

Feminist Sexual Performance Artist

Veronica’s Act

The Vagina as Performance Prop

There is no question that these white women – all of who are well spoken, fairly well educated women – would not be making these movies if they were bound by the conventional wisdom and morality regarding ladylike decorum. With an almost religious joy on their faces, they enthusiastically engage in every imaginable sexual act with a group of 5 to 7 well hung energetic black males, who vigorously penetrate all their orifices, and then the self-identified white “sluts” routinely swallow their sperm with great fanfare.

While it is conventional wisdom that women in porn are ruthlessly exploited victims of an amoral male dominated industry, the testimony of the women themselves range from those who feel exploited – a la Linda Lovelace of Deep Throat fame, to those who find the experience empowering and often pleasurable…they love their work and don’t wish to be rescued.

Nina Hartley: Enthusiastic Seasoned Slut

There’s no shame in this Gal’s Game!

The venerable Nina Hartley, who is billed as having “the best ass in porn,” earned a nursing degree from the prestigious San Francisco Medical Center before she ever entered the sex entertainment business. She is the quintessential example of a woman who gets off on her job. She started as a stripper in North beach clubs, the made her way into the porn industry where she found her true calling. Determined to do what she wanted as a woman without regard for prevailing social conventions, Nina had sex with black men despite warnings from porn producers that she would lessen he market value with white men, who are the majority of porn consumers – which, incidentally, has turned out to be untrue.

Nina Hartley with Ray Victory

Flaunting Racial Taboos

Now well into her fifties, Nina is still making movies for a new generation of fans. In fact, she has helped spawn a new genre called MILF films – “Moms I’d Like to Fuck” – which are becoming increasingly popular with young and older fans, male and female; like most porn Queens Nina is bi-sexual. She is also a high price “escort.” From everything she has said for the public record, and as an intelligent articulate women she has said plenty, she really enthusiastic about here work – which she has been at for over thirty years and thousands of flicks.

Nina as MILF

She’s into Black gangbangs too

When questioned about why she chose a career in sex work by writer Vanessa Pinto, in the San Francisco Huffington Post in March of 2012, Nina said ever since she was a teenager, before she went to college. She thought about becoming a prostitute, but it was illegal and dangerous. Then she explained:

“”Why sex? Because sex is my thing. It is what I am about both as a queer person, but also as a nurse and a health professional. In our society sexuality is sick and sick people need a nurse’s care. I am here not just for my own jollies, of which I’ve certainly had plenty. I am also here to talk about sex with people who cannot talk about it. A nurse’s role includes education, role modeling and advocating for those who cannot speak for themselves. I educate people in safer sex and how to be better at it. I advocate about sexual freedom and sexual autonomy for people who are still in danger of losing hearth, home, children and job, should their sexual lives become known. So I am out here because I don’t have any kids to embarrass.”

It is clear that Nina not only adores her job but believes she is providing an important human service. And Nina is not alone. It’s kind of an individual thing. Acting in porn movies is a voluntary career choice however, so the very act of choosing is an exercise in self-determination that represents a newfound freedom for females. And while many contemporary porn stars may not understand this legacy any better than many black and Hispanic baseball players understand that they are the progeny of Jackie Robinson, there are some who do.

For instance in a February 23, 2013 article by Dylan Ryan titled “How I Became a Feminist Porn Star,” we find clear evidence of intellectual continuity between the pioneering pro-sex feminist strain in porn and the present generation. Ryan tells us:

“My engagement with porn was not one challenged by shame. I respected the women who I saw in the films and had little to no preconceived judgments about them, but I would find myself critiquing them as performers and considering what I would do differently and better… I was exposed to images of some of the scions of feminist pornography including Annie Sprinkle and Nina Hartley. I watched Nina Hartley’s films and felt admiration for her clear and frank way of talking about sex. I loved that she was completely present and aware of herself and her presentation. The films Nina, Annie, and others made represented a sexuality that was open, honest, and without shame; they showcased sex that was fun and consensual. They had a sexual agency that I found arousing.”

However Ryan does not shrink from engaging the issues of shame that any “respectable lady” would be expected to feel from indulging in explicit sexual acts in a public forum, and the coercions that most outsiders assume female porn stars are subjected to. She tells us:

While I know that I feel good about what I am doing and do not experience coercion in my sex work, it can be difficult to communicate that to others. It can also be difficult to express my personal belief that a woman has the right to engage in consensual objectifying activities without shame. Looking back on interviews I gave in the past, I see how my responses have evolved. I became more aware of what kind of career I was crafting for myself in the porn industry, and I became more comfortable with articulating that to people. My initial ideals about my role in porn slowly transformed into what I actually did in porn. Porn has been a positive choice for me. It is no longer something I think will be good for me, it is something I can say has been empowering and strengthening rather than oppressive and denigrating.”

Those who find it difficult to connect willing female performers in porn movies with women’s liberation should consider the fact that defining and controlling female sexuality is a cornerstone of the patriarchal order worldwide. One need look no further than the fact that there are still countries where they would be stoned to death for such bawdy sexual behavior – Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iran, Jordon, etc.

To understand the extent to which patriarchs will go to control the sexuality of women one need only consider the case of Misha’al bint Fahd, a beautiful Saudi Arabian Princess from the House of Saud, who went to study in Lebanon at the age of 19. There she met and fell in love with the nephew of the Saudi ambassador and they had a sexual relationship. Upon her return to Saudi Arabia word had reached the kingdom, conveyed by spies who wished to gain the favor of the Royal family, that the princess had conspired to meet with her young lover alone on several occasions.

Based on that flimsy charge the Princess and her lover were charged with adultery, her close family begged her not to admit it, but she confessed that she and Khaled al Sha’er Mullhallal had been lovers after a failed attempt to flee the country disguised as a man. Under sharia law they were both executed in the public square by beheading!

The Public Execution of Princess Misha/al bint Fahd

The Ultimate Male Tyranny!

An Adulteress in Somalia

This is the fate of women who break male norms

There are gruesome executions like this, often by stoning, all over the Islamic world even in the 21st century. And as I write another Saudi Princess is in England hiding out from her husband who has pledged to execute her, with her family’s blessings no less, because he suspects her of committing adultery.

Princess Misha was executed in Jedda Arabia on 15 July 1977, and was the subject of a BBC documentary “Death of A Princess.” This sexist atrocity was committed eight years after the radical feminist Red Stockings Manifesto, and it is reasonable to assume that American feminist were aware of it. And it could not have helped but fire the radicals up for a full frontal assault on all the vestiges of patriarchal power and privilege, which was mostly exercised by hetero-sexual white males.

It does not take a great deal of imagination to see how the status of women in a male dominated world could fuel them for the fight everywhere. However women in Muslim dominated societies don’t enjoy the constitutional right to free speech guaranteed to American women. Hence the rejoicing of young Arab women in France at the banning of the Muslim veil by the French government, which saves young girls from having those oppressive medieval customs imposed on them by their families – is indicative of the way many educated women feel in Islamic countries.

An Arab Girl in France Rejoices at Outlawing of the Veil in France

She know this law will liberate her Islamic Oppression

This contemptuous attitude toward the anachronistic puritanical custom of veiling women – to prevent them from tempting men – is widespread among educated Arab women I have discussed this question with them in England and the US. One of the main ways they are showing their absolute contempt and hostility towards these dangerous, often murderous, male methods of repressing female sexuality is by putting their bodies on display in what are considered sexually provocative ways, and fucking black men – behavior that would get them stoned to death in the old country.

In fact I have known several well born Arab women who were living a liberated life in American University communities; and they were all pretty wild. In fact, one of their black male lovers told me that he was beginning to understand why Arab men were afraid of their sexual prowess and felt the need to suppress it; the other wondered if they “were on a secret mission to assassinate black American men with pussy!”

The Ultimate Taboo in 1865

The Fear that Provoked a War

The bloody history that surrounds sexual relations between black men and white women in the US, leaves question that the willingness of white American women to appear on screen in living color and violate the most longstanding taboos about proper behavior for lovely white ladies – by banging a group of burly ebony black men packing a yard of dick -represents a radical transformation of conventional mores on sex, gender and race in American culture and society.

Charlotte Stokely: Heir to Nina Hartley

A Joyful Banger!

There Seems no End to Willing White Women

Who happily Bang Black Gangs!

Some Even Become Superstars

Like Inari Vachs

The old order of white male sexual tyranny has been overturned and white females are seeking liberty in a variety of ways. There can be but little doubt that the ability of white women to publicly engage in wanton sex with black men on films, without worrying about violent attacks from outraged white boys driven by racist hysteria, represents a newfound freedom for white women in the US; notwithstanding what one may think of the wisdom of morality of their choices.

Yet, after all is said and done about this issue, I tend to agree with the late comic/philosopher/provocateur/ social critic Lenny Bruce on the question of obscenity in movies. Noting the insatiable American appetite for gunplay in films, even as they condemned pornography, Bruce – who had been arrested on moral charges for his sexually explicit act – observed with deep sense of the absurd: “A penis shoots life…a gun shoots death! “

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It is virtually impossible to properly understand the full magnitude of the cultural changes that made possible interracial gangbang films without the viewing it in historical perspective. The hysteria of white southern males regarding sex between black men and white women was on dramatic display in the case of the Scottsboro boys in the 1930’s.

One of the most notoriously miscarriages of justice in any modern democratic country, nine young black men from Alabama were riding the rails as hobos during the depression in search of work. When the boxcar was opened by during an inspection by police in Scottsboro Alabama two white women were found hovering in a corner on the other side of the car. Since they were dressed like raggedy men and ugly as sin, the boys had not noticed them. And in any case the racial etiquette of the south at the time would not have encouraged fraternal relations between white and black men.

The Scottsboro Boys

Condemned to Death for a Rape they didn’t Commit!

The Sad Sack White Bums they were Convicted of Raping

Poor and Powerless they Dared Not Speak the Truth

A Mass Movement Organized by the International Labor Defense Committee

This Movement, Organized by the Communist Party, saved their Lives

None of this mattered once the white cops discovered that two white females were riding in a railroad car at night with nine black “bucks.” The young men were charged with rape and sentenced to death. The verdict set off an outcry that was heard around the world.

Hence the Emmett Till lynching of 1957 was but one many instances of white male madness on the question of white women and black men enjoying a sexual relationship. The extent and variety of their pathological obsession on this issue is revealed in the notorious 1957 “Kissing Case” in Monroe North Carolina. The pertinent facts of the case involve a group of white and black children playing together chasing fireflies and the like. One of the white kids suggested that this white girl give the black boys a kiss, and she kissed each on the cheek. And that’s the long and the short of it.

The trouble started when the little girl innocently told her mother about her kissing the black boys. The parents called the police and told them the boys had raped their daughter. The boys, 9-yr old james Hanover Thompson and 7 yr-old David Simpson, were arrested and charged with molesting a white girl. Here is one of the boy’s recollection of the event as an adult.

“They uh….took us down to the bottom of the police station to a cell. And they had us handcuffed – they started beating us to our body, you know? They didn’t beat us to the face; where nobody could see it; they just punched all in the stomach, and back and legs. We thought they was gonna kill us.”

On the other hand, Louis Medlin, a white Monroe resident charged in 1959 with assaulting and intending to rape a black woman who was eight months pregnant, was acquitted by the court despite extensive evidence of his guilt. The fact of the acquittal was bad enough, but the argument of the defense so enraged the black community that Robert Williams, a veteran of the US Marine Corps and President of the Monroe NAACP, told black men that they must judge their white transgressors and carry out the sentence on the spot.

Williams called for the black community to arm themselves and he began training them. This would soon result in an armed clash between blacks and whites that put the Klan to flight and resulted in a federal warrant for Robert Williams on trumped-up charges. Rob didn’t wait around he skipped town… and then the country; he wasn’t willing to take his chances with the American justice system – a system he had fought to preserve.

Despite the myriad injustices that were the everyday lot of Afro-Americans living under white supremacy, it was the southern attitudes regarding interracial sex that most often led to violence. However there was an unintended consequence of all the white male hysteria about sex between black men and white women: It made both of them curious about the other, and both became angry about white male privilege.

This curiosity and anger would result in black men and white women tasting this forbidden fruit in the fifties and sixties as undercover lovers, then out in the open as legal barriers fell…and now they are doing it in movies that seem to be everywhere on the world wide web! It is important to remember that this is a market-driven phenomenon, a business, which means that these films exist because there is a demand for it.

It was a telling development when one of the first commercial blockbusters in the hardcore porn industry was “Behind the Green Door,” an interracial flick featuring Marilyn Chambers, the effervescent fresh faced blonde model from the Ivory Snow Ads. Paired with the muscular ebony complexioned Johnny Keyes, her alabaster skin was accented, magnifying the racial differences.

It was a smash hit, Marilyn Chambers became the first porn superstar, and things have never been the same regarding the depiction of explicit sex between white women and black men in erotic movies. An indication of how dramatically attitudes have changed on this once explosive issue we need only consider the fact that Marilyn Chambers ran for the Vice Presidency in 2004 and 2008 on the tickets of the Libertarian Party.

Marilyn Chambers as VP Candidate

Just Another Suburban Politician

This was no picayune development in American popular culture. In fact, in one of the most dramatic turnarounds in the history of American race relations, the image of the black penis has gone from menace to fetish in these interracial Porn flicks. In film after film, the generously proportioned black penis is an object of veneration reminiscent of ancient Phallus worship cults.

We see this tendency toward veneration early on in these interracial porn scenes, such as in the early pairing of Ray victory and Nina Hartley. The way in which she holds his generously proportioned ebony member in her alabaster hands, adores it with voracious stares…before sucking on it as if she were suckling on the tree of life.

If we consider the long history of employing social ostracism, extra-legal mob violence, and the coercive power of the state to prevent black men and white women from having sex, it is hard to overstate the radical nature of this development. And the symbolic significance of the gangbang as a rejection of the historic status of the “White Lady,” a reverential status in American society bestowed upon them by white males, for the despised role of a “nigger lovin slut” obsessed with BBC – Big Black Cock in the parlance of porn – is virtually impossible to comprehend…especially by people who grew up after the demise of legal segregation in America.

The Ivory Snow Girl

She shocked the Nation!

Open adulation, coupled with unabashed penis envy, is most apparent in the cuckold films, where white men get off watching their wives being sexually ravaged by black men. There is a whole genre of these films which are advertised as home-made amateur films shot by the husband as his wife cavorts with her black bangers. And given the abundance of advertisements from white couples on the internet seeking young hung black men willing to gangbang a white wife while her husband watches, one is not certain if these films are a case of life imitating art, or art imitating real life!

There are myriad films where the white husband’s puny penis is compared with some king-sized black penis while he is being excoriated for his shortcomings by his wife. But the ultimate celebration of the black penis is in the gangbang movies. Here the white females seem unable to get enough, and after she wears them all out, it is regarded as proof of superior female prowess for many of the women who watch these movies.

More importantly however, the freedom to make such movies represents the liberation of these women, and the legions that experience it vicariously by watching, from the restrictions imposed on women by the role of “Lady.” This is a recurrent theme in the commentary of the early feminist porn stars, who were all highly intelligent women that hailed from a wide variety of backgrounds.

While their choices may appear bizarre to most people, everybody’s got their own idea of personal freedom…and there are many roads to get there. In a free society adults ought to be free to do what they please so long as they are not injuring others. But, of course, when speaking of controversial cultural products what constitutes “injury” is a matter in dispute. It is a subjective judgment determined by one’s value system. Hence I shall confine my determination of “injury” to its legal definition.

Given the pervasiveness of pornography on the internet and the number of viewers it attracts, there can be no question that it has become an important influence on American culture in sexual matters. In an article titled, How Much Porn Does the Internet Hold, “journalist Adam Tarantola tells us:

“ The world’s top porn sites—XVideos, LiveJasmin, YouPorn, Tube8, Pornhub—are on par with Google and Facebook. XVideos alone averages 4.4 billion page views per month, double what Reddit pulls over the same time and triple what CNN can do. And it’s not just the amount of traffic that these sites generate, it’s the length of individual visits as well. Most sites, Gizmodo included, average three to six minutes per visit. Porn sites average five times that—15-20 minutes per visit.

In terms of actual data usage, porn sites are behemoths. Most sites average 50 – 200 TB of material, which individually really isn’t all that much. But during peak times, when the site’s loading image galleries, downloading content and streaming video, its data usage soars.” Then he cites statistics from Extreme Tech, who monitor the internet, and according to whom:

“You Porn hosts over 100TB of porn”, and serves “over 100 million” page views per day. All told, this equates to an average of 950 terabytes of data transfer per day, almost all of which is streaming video. This is around 28 petabytes per month, which means our 29PB estimate for X videos is on the low side; it probably serves 35 to 40PB per month. It gets better! At peak time, You Porn serves 4000 pages per second, equating to burst traffic in the region of 100 gigabytes per second, or 800Gbps. This is equivalent to transferring more than 10 dual-layer DVDs every second.”

Considering the world wide audience for their sexually explicit videos posted on the internet, it would be folly to deny that the decision of white women – who are often pretty and intelligent – to appear in them does not represent a profound cultural statement. And I have no doubt that the roots of this rebellion of white women against white male defined roles regarding gender and race are rooted in the pro-sex radical feminist thought of an earlier generation.

I met several of these women and interacted with them off and on over a 20 year span from the mid-1960’s to the middle of the 80’s. Those who made the greatest impression on me with their radical feminist ideas were Ti Grace Atkinson, Annie Sprinkle, Veronica Vera and the brilliant Australian feminist intellectual Germaine Greer, author of the best-selling book “The Female Eunuch.”

I have said little of Greer, since she is Australian, and it is beyond the scope of this essay to try and cover every important feminist thinker whose contribution to the redefinition of sex and gender roles is reflected in the revolt against white Ladyship. Yet this essay would be incomplete without reference to her.

A highly educated albeit mercurial thinker, Greer is said to have challenged the father of Rock Guitar, Jimi Hendrix, to an arm wrestling match and won. She has described herself as an anarchist with Marxist leanings…which explains why her analysis of the place of women in society is so confusing to her intended audience, as well as other interested readers who have grappled with “The Female Eunuch.”

However her attacks on marriage, the family, chastity, elegance, high heels, and “femininity” itself – along with her declaration that the “Buck Negro” is the most sexually potent male on earth, and her admonition to her white middle class sisters to fuck anybody they want – Dr. Greer, a Shakespeare scholar, must take some of the credit, or bear the blame depending upon your perspective, for the wholesale abandonment of all the perceived virtues that attend respectable ladies. Now, in her dotage, she apparently regrets it.

Germaine Greer

Whassup? Looks like a model right here

As I weigh the evidence, it appears that the interracial gangbang featuring a white woman and a posse of well-endowed black males is as much about money and personal empowerment as sexual pleasure. Financial independence and empowerment are two of the enduring issues of the women’s movement harking back to 19th century.

For Victoria Woodhull these aspirations converged with the desire for sexual freedom among the free thinking radicals. She not only was a spiritual leader who preached “free love” and declared it more honorable to be a whore than a wife, but she established the first female owned investment bank with a clientele of Madams who ran the country’s many whorehouses and their “working girls,” Vicky was also the first woman bold enough to run for the US Presidency, with black Frederick Douglass, who was rumored to be her undercover lover – as Vice President.

My objective in this essay is to ponder the cultural significance of the increasingly popular genre of hardcore porn featuring the interracial gangbang, a sexual free for all involving a single white woman with five to seven hung young black males. And they perform every sexual act they can think of. Given the history of sex between black men and white women – which for most of the history of the USA was a life and death matter- this must mean something of real importance.

What, one wonders, is the meaning of the “cuckold” movies that purport to be home movies filmed by the husbands as their wives fuck a platoon of black hung like horses, or the flicks where the “husband” cleans the semen of black men from the vagina’s of their wives with their tongues? One does not need to be an expert in human psychology to recognize the symbolic destruction of the prerogatives of white patriarchy in these acts.

Just as it is obvious that the growing genre of “interracial bondage gang bangs” represent a perverse expression of total freedom for the white women who engage in them. This freedom is emphasized in the interviews conducted with the women who appear in the videos before the shoot, in which it is made clear that this is role play and the women are always in charge. They ask them what kinds of things they have fantasized about, and what they will or won’t do.

Then they give them a code word and gesture to use if the role playing became too rough. None of them ever stop the action in the films I studied, although the action gets very wild. Whatever the motives for the production of these films, whether cultural or commercial, and I have little doubt that financial imperatives were paramount, the willful participation of these well educated eloquent white women – no dem and doze “Dumb Dora” types here – represents a conscious decision to violate every taboo associated with the “White Lady.”

I have spent little effort on explicating to motives of the men who appear in this flicks. that’s because the motives of males are far less complicated. While some are no doubt turned on at the chance to humiliate white males by demonstrating their sexual prowess – the historical revenge motive – most are motivated by pussy and money. Revenge, pussy and money have moved men to treachery and greatness throughout history; in all times and places. I believe there is nothing deeper than that going on with the gang bangers in these movies; as near as I can tell these dudes just seem to be banging white boxes for bucks and having a ball!

An Act of Freedom?

Scene from a Bondage Gang Bang

Although I would not want any woman I care about to be involved in the porn business, I have taken no moral position on the performers in porn movies or the genre itself. The best that can be said, if one wanted to be completely fair and objective, is some people’s vices are other folks virtues….Let those who are without sin cast the first stone.